Snippings

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It is a fair question to ask whether there should be state regulation of virtual currency.

From Virtual currency needs one regulator, not 50 | American Banker

It is, I would imagine,  a byproduct of state regulation of banks.

Remember, the blockchain is uncensorable and resilient, a permanent record of transactions always available everywhere, so in cases of (for example) natural disasters then it can provide an identity infrastructure.

In fact, the five-hour breakdown was so bad, Amazon couldn’t even update its own AWS status dashboard: its red warning icons were stranded, hosted on the broken-down side of the cloud.

From AWS’s S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn’t get into its own dashboard to warn the world • The Register

Ah. Well, let’s suppose that wise organisations employ people who know how to design blockchains properly (so that all the consensus-forming nodes do not sit in virtual machines in a single data centre, for example).

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Regulation — ‘aligning financial regulation with the Global Goals … to make sustainable asset classes more investible at lower cost.’

From Getting into the Flows – Project Breakthrough – Medium

So, if we look at the patten of the co-evolution of money and technology what we would expect to see is the sustainable assets classes as a mechanism for deferred payment that becomes a store of value and then a means of exchange. The means of exchange then becomes a currency that denominates other transactions. Richard Roberts goes on to identify candidate currencies based on which 

I had the honour to chair one of my favourite fintech entrepreneurs, Mike Laven of CurrencyCloud, at this years MoneyConf in Madrid.

President Trump: Replace The Dollar With Gold As The Global Currency To Make America Great Again

From President Trump: Replace The Dollar With Gold As The Global Currency To Make America Great Again

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Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s leader [called] for every member of the United Nations to adopt the “acmetal”.

From Time for the Borat | Consult Hyperion

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The OBWG’s proposals envisaged open APIs being used in a broader context than the payments market which PSD2 standards will apply to, as well as the limited scope of the CMA’s project on business and consumer current accounts.

From Initiatives on open APIs in banking must be joined up, says expert

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As you may remember, in the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) asked the Payment Strategy Forum (PSF) to come up with a strategy to increase competition and innovation. This strategy, published in November last year, has a number of different threads to it, but one is that of particular interest to us is the call for new guidelines on “identity verification, authentication and risk assessment”.

The Forum said: “We expect that the guideline would include requirements for improved identity assurance in a number of these areas: account opening, re-authentication of long-standing account holders, setting up payment mandates, confirming payer and payee when initiating payments, mutual authentication (e.g. bank identifying itself to customer), and incorporating identity assurance into existing risk assessment processes.”

From ‘Payments architecture’ set for major modernisation in the UK

Now these are all quite different requirements, so it’s very intellectually interesting problem to come up with a solution that will work effectively in all of these cases. What it seems to imply to me is that we need some form of identity infrastructure for the financial sector. Given that the PSF also backed the creation of a shared KYC utility (for business customers), 

Now obviously I’m not privy to the deliberations of the Forum, so I couldn’t say what their vision for the new financial services identity infrastructure might be, but suppose we were to imagine some form of Financial Services Passport (FSP) with supporting infrastructure. 

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The second payment services directive (PSD2) is designed to boost competition in the name of “open banking” by forcing banks to allow third parties, such as innovative financial technology companies, to access the data of customers who authorise it… But fintech bosses said the fine print of PSD2 was being written in a way that gave too much power to banks. 

From Subscribe to read – Linkis.com

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One of the key goals for DLT platforms is to eventually get “cash on-ledger” issued by one or more central bank. 

From Layer 2 and settlement | Great Wall of Numbers

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[Bank of Canada] argues that “well designed and managed private digital currencies could circulate widely but only with appropriate government regulation to ensure their safety, soundness, and uniformity”.

From Private digital currencies need regulation to flourish – Bank of Ca…

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The Bank of England has made “big improvements” in its ability to forecast the UK economy, the Bank’s chief economist has told MPs. Andy Haldane… acknowledged that “sizeable” economic forecasting errors had been made in the past, especially at the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

From Bank of England ‘has improved’ its economic forecasting – BBC News

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